


Things We Lost To The Rising Tide

by orphan_account



Series: What We Lost To The Fire [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Golden Age of Piracy, Historical, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 04:45:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18865984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: They have enough money between them for a small schooner that rides high and quick in the water. They hire a small, discreet crew, who shrug and change the subject whenever the matter of the two captains sharing a bunk arises. The men don’t mind that the two of them cannot be parted, that Elijah’s breathing gets fast and panicky if anyone tries. There is only sympathy when Quinn wakes screaming in the night, that one last brush with death has left its mark on him. Quinn and Elijah live with hands entwined at last, dance through life together at last, running across the water like the whisper of the wind, until their names fall from the minds of those on land.





	Things We Lost To The Rising Tide

 

**April 12 th, 1705**

**Somewhere off the coast of Puerto Rico.**

 

The sea and sky blur together, rivulets of steel-blue and grey twisting and blending, tumbling over one another like watercolours. The sky, that terrible dark wide sky- he can taste it. It tastes like blood and gunpowder.

 

Air smacks out of his lungs when he hits the water, plunging, straining to breathe as the ice rushes in. it seethes against him, rallying as he tries to clutch onto that last blessed lungful of oxygen. He’s choking, spluttering, in a shock of cold as the bubbles slip through his fingers and up to the burning sky. The sea is not his friend. It has never been his friend. It only takes and takes and takes, and he’s reaching, seeing fire glittering on the roiling surface like the light-glow inside a ruby. A separate weight crashes down beside him, heavy, wooden, broken, rising up and away from the depths.

 

Elijah reaches, misses, splinters sliding into his palm and sticking in a red slick of blood, panic dropping like mercury down his spine. He opened his mouth to yell, but it’s only him and the ocean, flooding in, surrounding him, coughing, firelight growing faint above his head. The world is fading away now- or is it him that is fading? He is transparent, glasslike, barely lucid. The firelight is fading, and his limbs are like lead. He can’t swim up, can’t get to where it-

 

Pressure. Pulling, orange growing wider; going dim at the edges; until his face is bursting through, and air- precious, glorious gasps of salt-crisp-smoke-stained air is forcing away the water, and he sobbed…

 

Cold hands. Icy fingers clinging to him.

 

“Hold on.” That’s his rescuer. It should be a scream,  but the words rasp, swallowed by the roar of cannons and flame. This voice; he remembers he’d heard it before, and it’s-

 

_Thought I’d never see you again. Especially not today._

_Quinn! You’re not supposed to be here, this is only for officers!_

_Bet you won’t tell. I bet._

“Qu- Qui-“

 

“Quiet. Don’t. Just breathe.” Scared. The voice is scared, he’s so scared he’s- “Hold onto this.”

Wood presses against his elbow, and he grabs for it. A fragmented slab of deck. A slight, freezing hand balls up the back of Elijah’s shirt. Where did his coat go?

 

“You’re okay. You’re okay.” The voice tries to soothe, but it’s not quite right. He comes slowly back to himself. He can see the white around the irises of the cabin-boy’s eyes, the reflection of yellow and red flames burning over Elijah’s left shoulder. Quinn tries to stop him, but he turns to stare at the ship, the _HMS Tigress_ , the only home they have had for a year, alight against the backdrop of a grey and crawling dawn.

 

Though Elijah is nearly two years older, Quinn lets him weep – tears lost in the saltwater wash of the sea -  and doesn’t poke fun, and rubs small comforting circles on his back with frigid, wet fists.

 

They cling to their little raft together for seven hours before they are rescues, seven hours of drifting through the shards and wreckage of their ship in the choppy waves, past the bodies of the crew. When _HMS Lancer_ plucks them from the sea, they are hauled up and dropped onto the deck. That’s it, just simply dropped to huddle in a sodden heap, to face all those officers, all expecting Elijah to provide the report. He’s the junior officer, he’s the ones whose parents purchased his commission, he’s the one who-

 

He does his best to explain, but the ground pitches under him, and he can’t bring his trembling lips to form the words.

 

“It was pirates, sir.” Says Quinn in the face of his silence, Quinn who is fourteen years old and a cabin-boy besides. The Captain; a flogging Captain if Elijah has ever seen one; cuffs him instantly. The crack of the vicious blow sends the small body crashing, crumbling, crashing down to the perfectly-scrubbed wooden boards, and Elijah jumps but doesn’t go to him, doesn’t watch the slow slide of blood down the side of the boy’s face. He’s torn between cringing away and objecting to this treatment with a wrath that makes his head spin.

 

He suddenly recovers the voice which had been lost somewhere amidst the anguish of the day, informs the captain of the day’s events in as precise and exacting detail as his sixteen-year-old mind can piece together. Hoping it will be enough. Fighting down a sob of relief when it is.

 

Later, belowdecks, he will press a cool rag to Quinn’s ear, murmuring comforting nonsense words while his friend curls around him, shivering and trying to absorb Elijah’s warmth. And Elijah is just thankful that there’s a bunk free.

 

When the ship puts in at port, Elijah is hustled away by the Captain to the purser’s office: safely returning the fourth son of an established lord will merit him a fat prize indeed. His face is a pale oval caught between a pair of long blue coats as Quinn - who isn’t anything to anyone, except that he thought he was, he _thought_ – watches him go, peeking through the slats in the ship’s railing. Those blue-grey; sea-coloured eyes; too innocent, too kind for what this world expects of him; they keep lock with the brown-green pair until the last.

 

Elijah is fussed over, put under the unfriendly command of the Captain who rescued him, gets a letter from his father that he carefully tucks under the cover of his Bible, and continues his slow rise through the ranks of His Majesty’s Navy.

 

Quinn, he later learns, takes up piracy.

 

* * *

 

 

**November 24 th, 1709**

**Port Royal, Jamaica.**

Elijah pursues the thief, half in anger and half in blind terror at what will happen if he is discovered not in uniform. The Captain of the _Lancer_ is not a gentle man. Elijah has so far been able to escape his wrath, but has been forced to bear witness to countless punishments.

 

The blackguard is waiting for him in an alcove on the narrow street, snatches at his coat when Elijah rounds the corner, each breath searing like a new wound in his chest, not prepared for an attack, not expecting, so stupid, but- what’s this?

Laughter? Laughter. The good-for-nothing villain- the scoundrel - the _roué_ \- is laughing at him.

 

 Elijah blinks.

 

“So I can still run circles ‘round you, then?” The bitter grin in his voice is so at odds to that day on the _Tigress_ , the day they raced to the mizzenmast, but he’s practically the same, eighteen now, standing there twirling the stolen hat from hand to hand.

His face is narrower, thinner, tanned and freckled. He’s wiry, slender, toughened by the sea.

He moves quickly, talks quickly, the kind of slick-talking language that a gambling man would use. Elijah had tried to correct his grammar many times, but it had yet to sink in.  He’s a little older, more worn, the lines around his eyes a little harsher, still sun-beaten and undoubtably still just as quick as when they’d used to fence with broom-handles on the deck of their old ship. Quinn had always beaten him, and here, sun-beaten and nimble, his movements loose and his dark hair gleaming in the sun like the pelt of a seal and his laughing eyes gleaming like chips of mossy flint, Elijah had no doubt who would win if it came to blows.

 It was-

 

“Quinn.”

“So you do remember me, then? I’m not just another filthy little thief?” He’s sardonic, sarcastic, teasing. If he’s anything like he was when Elijah knew him, it’ll be permanently ingrained into his personality by now.

 

“I never said that.”

 

A laugh. Short, cut off too soon, high in its fake gaiety and therefore unexpectedly self-deprecating. “Well, you didn’t exactly try to correct your fellow officer.”

 

Elijah raises an eyebrow. “I was too busy chasing after you-“

 

Quinn embraces him then, unexpectedly, and Elijah tilts, near-hysterical- _does he have a knife- is he going to stick_ -? Alarm shifts to shame. How could he ever believe that Quinn would…

 

“Where’ve you been? Oh, Quinn…” he mumbles into the darker boy’s shoulder. They stand nearly level now; when had Quinn gotten so tall? “Why didn’t you join me on the _Lancer_? I told them to bring you, I said that-“

 

“Oh, lordling…” Quinn chuckles, and Elijah is paralysed by nostalgia from that nickname, Quinn making fun of him on the _Tigress_ , curious over his fair hair and fair skin, poking teasingly at his fine clothes.  “Those that are on your level won’t ever pay a mind about those that’re on mine.”

 

“That’s not true.” Says Elijah, the words creeping out without his permission, red flooding his cheeks when he realises what he’s saying. “I think of you all the time.”

 

Quinn took a step back, eyes narrowed and flicking across the older boy’s face, searching for something, and Elijah does his best to show whatever emotion he was looking for.

“I believe it.” The younger one admits- finally- but so much taller, all long gangly limbs- “I think about you as well.”

 

And at that Elijah is suddenly nervous, anxious, wringing his hands like a wretch, worried that Quinn will find something else that he’s sure is etched into every line and feature. It’s something that the blond can’t quite place, a fluttering in his chest where his faint heart sits, and it’s terrifying.

“I can’t stay long.” Elijah blurts. “They’ll send others soon enough.”

 

That sours the moment, and the laughter dims from Quinn’s eyes. “Ah.” He says, his lips pursed, annoyed, shutting himself off. “Can’t be seen speaking to the likes of me? Understandable.”

 

“I can’t be seen talking to anyone, you silly thing.” He snapped back. “Especially not without my uniform. You know how a captain can be about banal things like that.” Elijah’s back itches just to think about it, and Quinn winces, recognises the source of his distress, and hands him back the hat, fiddling with the trim and twisting the fabric between lockpick’s fingers .

 

“What’s so great about the Navy, then?” Quinn asks him. Elijah settles the hat back on his head, and Quinn tugs on the end of the ridiculous wig beneath it. “Is it ‘cos they’ve given you better hair?”

 

“Stop that.” Elijah swats at him. “It’s not the hair.”

 

“Is it the beatings? The nice blue coats?” That’s the mocking tone again, but there’s notes underneath it, a kind of otherness that he can’t quite decipher. Elijah is too anxious to sort through what it means right now. What can he say? What exactly could he say to that?

 

“How else would I live, Quinn?” The disappointment in the face of his family, _we knew you were never meant for greatness, but this-_

“It’s simple. You could live like I do.”

Oh. There’s that otherness. Hope.

 

“I’ve heard how you get by,” says Elijah, strained, walking some unexpected line of rigging that he can see is rapidly fraying beneath his feet. It would be so easy to fall off here, to lose his balance and throw it all away, and he can’t see why he still clings on so desperately, but he hangs on anyway. “and I want no part in it.”

 

“Because being beaten for not wearing a hat sounds so good to you?”

 

Hope has fled, replaced by acid, and Elijah staggers back under the weight of spite in Quinn’s gaze. “Because- because the world needs order!” He argued, wringing his hands like a wretch. “Because it can’t all be chaos and rat-thievery and burning ships!”

 

“Just slaves and prisoners. Is that it?”

 

Elijah quiets at the contempt- lip-curling, snappish, snarling contempt.

“That’s not what I said, Quinn.”

 

“Go on. You better get moving.”

Quinn shoves at the air between them; air thick with discomfort now, heavy like lead; and Elijah opens his mouth, and closes it again. There’s nothing more to say. He feels like a stopped bottle of champagne that’s been shaken and rolled on stormy waves. Another thread of the tightrope snaps.

 

He backs away, willing Quinn to understand, incapable of piecing together the phrases which will mend this new rift and make it right.

 

“Wait.”       

 

One word is all it takes, and Elijah freezes, stops moving; and Quinn, nonchalant, as-quick-as-you-please, darts forward and seizes his wrist. Quinn snatches Elijah’s wrist and pulls it to his lips, and gently, gently presses the softest of kisses there; right where the vein thrums against the bone.  A dangerous, tempting thrill shoots down the blonde’s spine, and Elijah makes a sharp, surprised sound, torn between being tantalised and terrified. The feeling of it bursts in his chest like an explosion and drums in his ears with the echo of his heartbeat, and he’s robbed of breath and hit with the drowning urge to tear away and run. Quinn closes his eyes, just a second, and drops his wrist, and then he’s off down the road. And… gone.

 

Elijah is left standing there, starstruck, a blinding realisation dropping into his head and burning in his mind like a hot coal, hitting him like an anvil to the skull. The world has shifted on its axis beneath his feet, and he clings to it by the tips of his fingers, afraid that he will fly from his foothold at any moment. He stands there with a look on his face as if he’s been handed the reins of Apollo’s phaeton, and is expected to hold the horses to their work.

 

He finds a letter addressed to him on the _Lancer_ , just before he’s promoted and changes ships. The spelling is slightly questionable, the handwriting so dignified; unlike his own crabbed and spidery chicken-scratch scrawl. The signature – a friend.

 

He knows exactly which friend it’s from.

He conceals Quinn’s letter in his bible, squirreled away next from the one from his father, so many years now gone by.

 

* * *

 

**_February 4 th, 1712_ **

**_St. Georges, Grenada._ **

 

There’s an early-morning altercation between the crew of the _HMS Lammergeier_ and a two-bit crew who sought to emancipate a shipment of liquor from a schooner in port, and those on watch are sent scurrying after the criminals and into the dark and serpentine alleys of St. Georges. Elijah _shouldn’t be here_ , says his newly-minted title, searing across his brain. _The ranking officer should be delegating, should send others in his place_. But how can he send another man to his death?

 

_You need to be harder on the men- they see the weakness in you and it will be your downfall._

The brigand ahead of him stops running, turns on his heel and rounds on him, blade raised, and then-

 

“Elijah?”

 

“Quinn?”

 

Elijah doesn’t lower his sword, and it pricks at his pride when Quinn drops his immediately, sure in his convictions of Elijah’s own personal loyalties. Even with his lieutenant’s bars, is he such an insignificant threat that Quinn can simply- ?

 

“Come off it, lordling. I’ve not seen you in how many years, and you want t’ spend it fighting? Really?” Quinn’s hand, curled around the neck of a rum-bottle, raises it to his lips, and he drinks deeply, hands the bottle to Elijah when he’s through. Elijah’s eyes dart to the shining rim, the gentle slosh of alcohol inside the dark glass. He is tempted. But he remembers why he is here, why the Navy had pursued the crew of the _Cobra_.

 

“Your crew is-“ How can he broach the subject? “-they’re criminals, Quinn.” He gets the words out as if they taste bitter, the condemnation a kind of feeble defence, although it sounds pathetic even to Elijah’s own ears. Quinn’s broken smile; much more crooked now he’s tipsy, and somehow more open than it ever was when they were boys; is unchanged. His arm is still offering the bottle, and after another moment of hesitation, Elijah snatches it, his sabre clattering to the cobblestones; and takes a slug of it. It doesn’t quite burn like it used to when he was young, when a mere whiff of spirits would make him hack and cough.

 

 And then he puts the bottle aside, drops it like it means nothing, watching the contents splatter the ground. It drains away, running like some small parody of a river into the gutter, glass shards glossy and dark as porpoises in the not-quite-light.

 

Quinn’s smile falters at the unexpected violence, and Elijah takes a half-step back, his back hitting the wall, his fingers curling into the thin cotton of Quinn’s sleeve, pulling him with him - his shirt is old and slightly frayed but freshly-washed, still almost impeccable, still looking better than Elijah ever could-- and looks at him.

And Elijah smiled.

 

“I missed you.” He admits, voice a whisper, Quinn’s nervous breath hitching at the confession. And then Quinn grins, sharp, blindingly so.

 

“Me too.” Says Quinn, and swoops down and kisses him.

 

Elijah has never been kissed before, but Quinn doesn’t seem to mind. He’s soft, gentle, one elegant and calloused hand confidently brushing a strand of blond away from Elijah’s face; because the preposterous powdered wig was long ago abandoned. And although Quinn had practically leapt forward in his eagerness, it’s chaste. A brief meeting of lips. And then it’s over, and Elijah has stopped breathing.

 

A strange, wistful ache blooms in Elijah’s chest, and he feels like he’ll burst with it, like a crushing water-pressure on his lungs.

 

“Lieutenant!” The bottom drops out of his stomach. One of the petty officers from Elijah’s ship. Far enough to give them time, too close, _too close_ not to send his heart into a frantic jig. Elijah freezes up, tenses, feeling rushed, time slipping from his grasp like water. He clutches Quinn’s shoulders like a drowning man, as Quinn kisses him once more, briefly, just beneath the ear, and Elijah shivers. His loyalties war within him. 

 

“Go.” He tells him, even as he clings to him, aching to reach out and catch his hand, to tangle their fingers together. This is Quinn, who he hasn’t seen in years. In three years, he’s seen neither hide nor hair of him. Yes, he’s heard things; awful, reckless, dreadful, awe-inspiring things. But that’s irrelevant, because it’s not proof. If Quinn was all that bad, especially with Elijah being as high up as he is now, their paths would’ve crossed sooner.

 

He finds the young man in front of him – forcing himself to relax now as his well-honed instincts take hold, scared, tense, drawn with fear in that glowing selkie’s gaze – difficult to reconcile with what he’s heard. And yet he cannot relate Quinn, this rakish version of him, to the cabin-boy he once knew.  Not anymore.

 

Quinn. His friend. Quinn. His enemy. Not an enemy with a capital E, but rather an enemy by virtue of simply being on the opposite side. They are like a deck of cards, juxtaposed, a mess of desires and expectations.

 

Quinn, shining, beautiful Quinn, who loves so quietly and softly despite his hard exterior. Quinn, who deserved the world, and didn’t get it, so he took it for himself instead. The cavalier. The lawbreaker. The _pirate_. The one who Elijah had known since before he was sixteen, when they’d been shaking boys out of their depths amid the wreck of the world they’d known. Somehow, in this moment, Elijah has become Icarus, so close to slipping and plummeting downwards, and he’s caught helplessly in orbit. The joy that had seized his mind sickens and turns to panic. They are breaking apart, seam by seam, thread by thread.

 

Time slips through his fingers with the steady clip-clip of approaching shoes on stone. If he knows one thing amidst the turmoil his mind’s become, it’s that they are two parallel lines, that they are like Icarus and the sun. If they come any closer, if they touch, it will end in death. There is no way around it.

 

“Go!” Elijah urges him, again, voice a hurried whisper. Quinn pulls away, lingers just a moment to drink in the sight of him with those dark, wise eyes; before he severs the connection and his eyes cut away. He turns on his heel, sprinting down the cramped avenue, flying, dashing, fleeing, hurdling a rubbish-pile and rushing away. If he’s found, Elijah knows he’ll hang for it. Quinn flees, and vanishes into a twisting alley so silently that it’s questionable that he was ever there at all, all traces of drunkenness and merriment gone.

 

They are breaking apart. He can do nothing. They are on opposite sides.

 

Elijah draws his pistol, fires high, because to aim and miss is more easily explainable than to not fire at all. His mind is screaming, but he… he’s calm. The shock of the gun’s kick jolts his whole arm, and he grunts in pain. Footsteps echo closer, closer, closer, the blue-and-white of a uniform drawing up beside him.

 

“Lieutenant! Did you capture him?”

 

Elijah shakes his head no, and his back aches with the force of the gunshot; and with the awful restrictive weight of seven years of wearing the coat of rich dark-blue brocade.

 

* * *

 

**August 12 th, 1712**

**Vieux Fort, St. Lucia**

 

They sit curled together in a draughty room; the backroom of the kind of establishment that caters to men of… unusual proclivities. Stifled laughter and eager sounds drift through the cracks in the thin walls, and the gentle crash and wash of the waves waft through the open window along the sea breeze. The night presses in like dark velvet, hot and damp and stiflingly humid.

 

Elijah runs the pads of his fingers down Quinn’s spine, feeling the raised scars on his back through the thin fabric of his shirt. He’s still wearing the ill-fitting clothes he’d found on his bed when he’d got back to the _Lammergeier_ , a dockworker’s shabby garments, probably stolen. They’d been neatly folded next to the note that’d brought him here, and the window of his cabin had been cracked open just a sliver, enough for either of them to slip in or out.

 

He hadn’t been sure that it hadn’t been a trick, but he’d known somehow that he wouldn’t be able to resist the siren-call either. Quinn runs in his veins like alcohol, like the brandy on his tongue, thrums through every heartbeat and every breath; better than tobacco, better than opium, the strongest drug he knows. Elijah knows he’s addicted. It’s an itch under his skin, a song playing over and over in his ears, a melody that moves through him and blurs his vision and sends chills down his spine. He can’t bear to avoid it, it’s gotten to the point where he… actively seeks it out. He’s tumbling, falling deeper to the waves at every turn.

 

He just can’t stay away, and if he had been wrong; if it had been a trick; he’d have died with a grin on his face. It’s like a blade lodged in his chest, and it steals his breath and hurts, hurts so intoxicatingly well that it’s like a storm, all ozone and electricity.

 

They are a storm. There is no safe harbour, not until the waves quiet. Like lightning dancing across the ocean. Quinn is a thief, has always been one, and he is slowly taking over Elijah’s mind, and a foolish, traitorous part of him just lets it happen.  He had come here with the expectation of anything, and instead-

 

Nothing happens. At least, nothing that Elijah expected of such a rendezvous, nothing like his shipmates’ drunken whispers of fumblings in the dark. They simply sit, and talk, and revel in each other’s heartbeats, because they are alive and fixing their ragged edges. Quinn seems to be making a habit of surprising him.

 

Quinn had met him, dragged him by the hand to this meagre room with its rickety bed, and had sat with him. He had carded his hands through Elijah’s short reddish-blonde curls, had let him unbind the green ribbon keeping his dark-brown tresses bound back. Elijah had brushed a cautious thumb over the freckles dappling the bridge of his nose, and Quinn, touch-starved, had leaned into it, had kissed his trembling fingers, had soothed his worried brow. And they had talked. The years which had risen like frontiers between them were fading away.

 

Now, Quinn sleeps, the soft half-slumber of a man finally at ease. He’s a little harsher, a little sharper, has grown up well into the expectations piled upon him in a way that Elijah has never quite managed. There are bruise-purple shadows beneath his eyes, his ribs show slightly through the off-white fabric of his shirt, but Elijah has remained the same. He is still soft, stout, solid, comforting in comparison. It’s a different kind of strength. The darker boy shifts in his sleep, whimpers, curls a goose-pimpled arm around himself as his other hand twitches as if he’s searching for something, in the throes of some sightless terror that the blonde would do anything to relieve. Elijah cannot.

 

Quinn wakes, eyes too bright for this time of night, curling closer and seeking out Elijah’s warmth. He smiles, meeting the worried blue gaze with that deep hazel. And he rolls over beneath threadbare covers, stretches, groans, runs his bare foot against Elijah’s ankle and makes him shiver at the cold.

 

“Let’s take my ship.” He says. It’s half-muffled, his face pressed into the pillow, and Elijah can almost pretend that he’d said anything but those four words, if he wanted to. Again, Elijah is tempted, feels torn over it, the newly-mended rends in the fabric of his soul tearing open again. Elijah freezes up, and Quinn ploughs on, sitting up.

 

“ _The Cobra_. She’s fast. The Captain’s a decent man, always looking for an experienced hand. Don’t have to stay on, of course, any obligations’ll pay for themselves in the time it takes to put some distance between us and them. You and I, we could go _anywhere_.” There’s that marked otherness again, that agonisingly unbearable optimism that life just hasn’t managed to beat out of him. Quinn surely knows his answer, but the tentative shyness in his voice is too much, and Elijah crumbles, collapses in on himself.

 

“Dear heart- _Quinn,_ my dearest one- you know I can’t.”

 

Quinn breathes, and it’s the same hiss as when Elijah closes his books at night and extinguishes his lamp, plunging the crabbed room into pitch-black and unexpected darkness. Quinn, knowing all too well that he’s pushed too far, sighs.

 

“Come here.” He says, and gathers Elijah towards him, and Elijah goes willingly.

 

“My dove- you don’t understand, it’s not that I don’t want to- it’s not that I- _we can’t_!“

 

“Hush.” Quinn cards a hand through his hair. “I understand. Loyalties.”

 

“I can’t just-“

 

“It’s fine.”

 

They take comfort in each other, Quinn still leeching away the heat of him, and Elijah takes a deep, hesitant, decisive breath and tangles their fingers together at long last, pale skin a sharp contrast against Quinn’s golden-brown tan.

 

Does it matter? In all likelihood, this will kill them both anyway. Elijah’s heart sings. He tries to contain the drops of memories that form tonight, like cocoa beans in a woven-palm basket, but they slip through the cracks and drain away as time wanes before he can devise another way to hold them. And it’s like trying to cling to water.

 

He must return before he is missed.

 

Despite Quinn’s wheedles and whines, he rises, swings the shabby coat around his shoulders and slips into his stockings and boots. Elijah stares at the empty place beside Quinn, thinks how easy it could be to-

 

“Consider it, lordling.”

 

Elijah pretends not to hear him, sneaks out of the room and back to where he’s hidden by his uniform and must be back in his bunk by daybreak. He makes it, only just, but it’s a pyrrhic victory that clangs hollow against his mind, as cold as the lonely berth he returns to.

 

* * *

 

 

**April 11 th, 1713**

**Montserrat**

In April, eight months after their last encounter, the _HMS Lammergeier_ is ordered to pursue and take the _Cobra_ , its Captain and crew responsible for the capture and murder of every man on board a peaceful merchant vessel and the loss of hundreds of pounds of property. Elijah doesn’t believe Quinn capable of such hellish cruelty, cannot imagine it, worse than the worst of the rumours. Quinn is no murderer. Elijah supposes it must be a mistake; if only they could talk, perhaps he can-

 

They take the _Cobra_ easily, and Elijah’s captain orders that the pirates who survived the initial attack be strung up on the highest yardarm without mercy or trial, a fitting retribution for the heinous transgressions they had committed.

 

But Quinn isn’t among the dead, or the prisoners.

Nine bodies hang from the topsail, but Quinn isn’t one of them.

 

* * *

 

 

**June 30 th, 1713**

**Nassau, Jamaica**

Elijah is hiding in civilian clothes, imbibing copious amounts of drink at an illegal establishment, and he knows he should care, but- he… he can’t.

 

There have been years of missed opportunities, purple prose painting over his sentiments, colourful lies and flowing, flowery, _superficial_ words hiding the truth. He wants to scream it, wants to yell from the rooftops, those four little words that are so useless now. He’s lost his chance. Except in sleep, of course, when he lets himself be dead to the world.

 

_I shall go about the morning city, and seek him who my soul loves._

In his dreams, Elijah presses a kiss to Quinn’s soft hair, and a laughing-eyed smile twists the younger one’s face, the early sunlight glancing off gold-wire-framed spectacles and golden earring-studs, one for luck. The moment aches, magnificently poignant, a wound in his chest where something had once been. A memory that had never happened.

_Hark! It seems I have found him!_

 

He can’t bring himself to care; he is possessed, obsessed, his mind screaming that _you’re almost a captain now, time to consider the Admiralty_. He ignores it. He can’t bear it, not with the memories, the spectres and leaden weights that hang on him like chains. Instead he considers the prospect of sinking to the ground and not rising, collapsing and never moving hence, until the world has buried him in years of sediment.

 

It’s almost like an afterthought when he sees it, a half-remembered profile he can never erase, one that snaps into clarity as the years flash before his eyes. He knows that gait, the slight swing of the hips, the way the man saunters; although he’s not sauntering now, he’s striding, hurrying, head down. Elijah is moving, without his own permission, stumbling, and time traps him like a fly in syrup, the air hot and heavy. He recognises it, recognises _him_ , and it’s home and homesickness all at the same time, and he would know it anywhere, because it’s his salvation and his own personal hell at once.

 

Elijah is scrambling to heave his feet out from under him, to rise and stumble out the door and catch up to put his hand on the man’s shoulder and say-

 

“Quinn?”

 

But the body shakes him off, keeps walking like nothing had happened, like _they_ hadn’t- but Quinn would never, he must be mistaken-

 

But no. Elijah could never mistake those eyes, peat-dark and lit up as they are.

 

“Quinn!” He’s alive! He made it off the _Cobra_ , or maybe he was never there at all, or maybe it was another miracle, like the _Tigress_. Elijah stops seeing the deck of that old ship burst into flame behind his eyes for just a second, can ignore the memories of a pirate vessel sinking beneath turbulent waves, because this is alright, this is redemption; and he wants nothing more than to tangle his fingers in that short dark hair, lace their hands together palm-to-palm like they had on that stolen night on St. Lucia, to press their lips together at last and feel the comforting thump of Quinn’s heartbeat against his own, and then….

 

But Quinn’s face is carved from stone, and Elijah doesn’t like this new jest.

 

“You don’t know- you can’t imagine how much-“

 

“Didn’t realise that men like you and I were on speaking terms, then.” Oh. Quinn is not toying.

Quinn is _furious_.

This- his tone is just pure rage, bitter spite.

 

“Quinn, what…?”

 

“The crew of the _Cobra_.” Quinn is trembling, quivering, shuddering with the weight of the anger on his shoulders. “Your Navy- they- _my god_ , the cabin-boy couldn’t’ve been older than fifteen. That’s not much more than _we_ were!”

 

The Navy disregards Elijah’s trauma, speaking through him like it’s nothing, more than a decade of automated responses activated as his oldest friend (dearest love?) stares down at him like he’s old grime on the anchor lines.

“The _Cobra_ was guilty of piracy, Quinn! you murdered an entire crew!”

 

“Of a slave ship, Elijah!” Quinn snaps, bristling, and he laughs, a dark and jagged sound. “We liberated a slave ship! Or didn’t your precious Navy tell you that part?”

Elijah goes lightheaded, dizzy; why is it that whenever he’s around Quinn he can never pull in enough air? Even before their first ship went down, even before the attack and the black water, he could never breathe when the younger boy smiled at him or tried to gently goad him, or made him laugh when he fell short of the Captain’s expectations and suffered in disgrace. Always, always, always like he was being slowly turned in a vice, his breath being forced from him.

 

“Do you want me to tell you what it was like belowdecks? Where we killed the captain and all his mates?” Quinn spits. “Imagine every plump, musty preacher that stood at the pulpit of your little home parish and told you about damnation for six hours every Sunday. All those terrible torments he told you about, all the gory details they loved to scare you with? The fire, the brimstone, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the flies and locusts?”

 

Quinn moves closer, the reek of alcohol thick between them. He breathes, seemingly calm.

 

“That priest had- no- bleeding- idea- what- _hell_ \- is!” He says, each word punctuated by a sharp jab to Elijah’s sternum, Quinn’s pointing finger accusing him of crimes beyond his control. “And your Navy is more guilty of murder than my old crew ever was.”

 

Elijah sees the suffering in his face, wants to wipe away the unshed tears from Quinn’s cheeks.

 

“My dear…” _Three words. He can’t say them, his speech stolen, his lips unable to form them. Three syllables, so simple, and yet he can’t-_

 

“Don’t call me that! Don’t you dare!” Quinn’s eves are bright, too bright, mouth twisted in an injured snarl at the betrayal. Then he leaves him, stumbling, drunk, back towards the docks, to his home, to the waves, and Elijah suffers a terrible rending as his foolish, traitorous heart tears out of him and follows.

 

Elijah, ashen and drained, half-dead, drags himself back to the fort.

 

Quinn tries to go back to sea.

 

He lasts a year and a half before the Navy drags him back in chains.

 

 

* * *

 

 

**December 21 st, 1715**

**Port Royal, Jamaica.**

The guard’s eyebrows raise suggestively, and he laughs something hideous and vulgar, lecherous eyes raking over him, his grin wide and full of blackened teeth. The stench of the man is unparalleled. Elijah is drenched in a cold, nervous sweat, trying to keep his hands from shaking. He smiles, thin and uncomfortable, thoughts blurring together and chasing each other into incoherency. _This won’t work, it can’t work, he’ll get caught any moment now, this could never have worked in the first place and-_

The guard tosses him the keys.

 

“Thanks very much for the bit of relief, sir. You enjoy yourself, now.” The disgusting creature mumbles as he departs from the cell-block to enjoy the price of bribery, shouldering past him. Elijah fights the urge to gag and splutter, guilt and nausea making him shudder. He hurries as fast as his legs can carry him, darting along the row, because there’s no time, and if he hesitates his heart will likely burst from his chest, his hands shaking as he fumbles through the keys , cold metal clunking against his clumsy fingers.

 

“Elijah?”

 

It’s a thin, uncertain, raspy whisper, almost unrecognisable, but it strengthens the Lieutenant’s resolve all the same.

 

“Quinn.” Elijah’s hands reach through the wide bars of the door, catching, grasping a ragged shirt-collar, holding onto Quinn like they are boys once again, caught in the swells of some inescapable shipwreck, and he breathes a nervous sigh and, before he can regret it, crashes their lips together.

 

It's messy, awkward, and their teeth clack in the chaos of it, and Quinn reels backwards with shock, before relaxing into it, wrapping his arms about the blond’s shoulders like he can’t bear to let go. There’s no finesse or elegance in this; there’s no time for that, there’s only desperation and that euphoric panic-laden _feeling_ , so much hope that Elijah is overflowing with it, that burns in his veins, that he can never quite express. The abrupt contact splits Quinn’s barely-healed busted lip, and Elijah can see him pale beneath the bruises that litter his skin and likely spread across his back like a pair of bloodied wings. Neither of them care all that much, until Quinn pulls away at last, breathing fast and shallow, looking stricken.

 

“You shouldn’t be here, lordling.” Quinn says, light even as death awaits him at daybreak, even as the shadow of their last meeting hangs over them like lead, like a shroud.  ‘M fairly sure the Navy has rules against aid and comfort to the enemy.”

 

“You’re not my enemy.” Elijah tries to fit the key in the lock, and drops it with shaking hands. Numbly, Quinn takes it from him when he goes to try again, looking like a startled cat, dark eyes almost black in the midnight lamplight.

 _I love you; I love you, I love-_ Elijah thinks, but he still cannot verbalise or vocalise it.

 

“No? Am I not a pirate? Do we not need laws, order, good man to stand against the chaos?” Quinn mutters, voice bitter and frightened, and Elijah’s breath leaves him in a jerky huff that saws from his lungs and… he won’t allow it to strike him silent again. Not now.

 

“Not these laws.” He says; admits; jaw set and brow proud, watching as Quinn undoes the lock, a painfully thin figure hunched nervously, bent double like a question mark as he fiddles with the mechanism and tries to get it to turn, his strength nearly failing him. “Not these men.”

Quinn wrenches the door open with a resounding screech of metal on stone, folds his trembling form gratefully into Elijah’s open arms at long last, and Elijah can’t tell whether his tremors stem from fear or relief.

 

“You’re a terrible man.” Quinn says, voice muffled by the fabric of Elijah’s coat. “D’you know that?”

 

“Why, pray tell, my dear?”

 

“Because you’re going to drive me insane.” Quinn twists, turns in his arms to face him properly, a flare of rising emotion colouring his cheeks with a flush of pink, looking up at him through long, dark lashes. His eyes catch the light just so that the coffee-dark irises _blaze_ , and the effect is that of feathers thrown over a fire. “You’re driving me mad. What am I supposed to do, now, knowing that you’ll be blamed? Just get away? Like that?”

 

Quinn sucks in a breath. “I know you, lordling, I can guess at what you’re planning- and I can’t leave you to suffer for my mistakes. That officer is a drunkard, but he’s not a fool, and he won’t swing for it either.”

 

Elijah doesn’t understand, cannot comprehend why he’s doing this, ruining it. Why can’t he just let them have this? Why does he need-

 

“No.” Says Quinn. “I won’t be selfish. My answer is no. Not this time, Elijah.”

 

And he steps back inside the cell.

 

 _What?_ Confusion and terror spar in Elijah’s mind. _No, I love you, I love you!_ And he knows, in the deepest and most well-hidden part of his soul, that if he does not follow Quinn out of here now, he will follow him to the noose. Tonight is his only chance. Quinn turns away, and then, he speaks once more.

 

“We’re in this together.” Quinn’s old, crooked grin through the bars, thought extinct, a dusty expression but still good, makes a reappearance as he talks. “We’re in this together. You and me. We go out tonight, or together at dawn. Either you think that what they do is right, and we both deserve the gallows, or they’re wrong and we deserve to cut and run, get out of here, the two of us, with our necks unbroken. You can’t have it both ways, Elijah. You need to pick a side.”

 

Elijah has already picked. There was no contest in his mind. But doesn’t Quinn understand? Doesn’t he see what-

And Elijah finally gets it. He understands at last that Quinn _doesn’t_ , that it’s rigidly black and white for him, that the possibility of Elijah doing what he’s done tonight seems impossible to him. Quinn _doesn’t_ , and Elijah allows him this moment and plays along with the game.  

 

“And which sides are those?” He drawls, pretending he still needs convincing. “The Navy or piracy?”

 

“No.” Quinn laughs, short and sharp, tinged with a desperate hysteria. “Of course not. It’s between them and me.”

 _Them and us_ , Elijah thinks, and furrows his brow, pretending to mull it over. Quinn’s bottom lip quivers; scared and defiant, as if he thinks there’s any other choice. And Elijah smiles, grateful, the burden of a decision lifted at long last, his torn edges fixing themselves at last. Finally. No matter what happens next, even if they’re hanged tomorrow for it. This dance is nearly over, the long waltz drawing to a close. “So?”

 

“You, you absurd man.”

A thousand cords of tension that have been steadily winding them tighter and tighter for years are sliced free by Quinn’s sudden and shy smile, and he can finally breathe. The tightrope snaps, and Elijah has ben walking it for so long that it leaves him paper-thin and uncertainly, luminously joyful. Elijah has been falling for years, only now can he fly; because Icarus flew, and humanity… Humanity only ever fell for love of gravity. And Elijah is free, after a decade.

 

“What?” Quinn is all cautious optimism, stammering. “Do you really- did you really?”

 

“No, I committed theft, bribery and treason because I’m going to try and beg forgiveness from the admiral tomorrow morning.” Elijah is overwrought as exhilaration blooms in his chest, his heart no longer secreted away.

 

“Theft?”

 

Elijah throws the stolen uniform at him.

“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

 

* * *

 

 

**Somewhere in the Caribbean.**

**After.**

 

Elijah never returns to the Navy.

 

Quinn does not return to piracy.

 

They have enough money between them for a small schooner that rides high and quick in the water. They hire a small, discreet crew, who shrug and change the subject whenever the matter of the two captains sharing a bunk arises. The men don’t mind that the two of them cannot be parted, that Elijah’s breathing gets fast and panicky if anyone tries. There is only sympathy when Quinn wakes screaming in the night, that one last brush with death has left its mark on him. Quinn and Elijah live with hands entwined at last, dance through life together at last, running across the water like the whisper of the wind, until their names fall from the minds of those on land.

And they share a cabin, a cabin full of shells and books and trinkets, little plants in pots, maps and small plans and yellowing letters tied with ribbon and kept safely inside old bibles with cracked leather binding. It’s not bad for a home.

 

Theirs is a reliable merchant vessel, known for taking on the odd dodgy job. Elijah wants to call her the _Tigress II,_ but Quinn tells him that that’s bad luck. They’ll forge their own name, their own path, their own _side_.

 

They do.

 

They call it _The Unicorn._


End file.
